Animation: The Phoenix and the Road-Runner

Abstract

It is not really possible to sum up the state of the animation art. Like the phoenix, brother of the road-runner, animation develops so fast and so haphazardly that it overtakes itself perpetually and is always disappearing from sight. The aficionado of the frame-by-frame film may thus sometimes feel like a morose and frustrated bird-watcher-or like a character out of Edward Lear, scrutinizing owls until, big-eyed and hook-nosed, he becomes something of an owl himself. Let us try to evade this danger. When animation is carved up by pompous specialists, the ever-renewed phoenix can turn into a cardboard chicken or a hunk of sandwich. The animators themselves, deep in technical questions, or captives without realizing it of the twists of fashion, are not always sound judges of advance or standstill in the field. A more objective viewpoint is necessary to evaluate this most rapid, most concentrated, most lasting product of the seventh art. At the Annecy Festival of Animated Films in 1962, we had plenty of Flebuses-in every screen ratio, their bodies reduced to head and legs, crossing brackish reels upon whose background decalcomania, collage, materials of the most bilious tachisme mixed-artistic techniques being rediscovered thirty years late by the commercial (auto, appliance, etc.) salons of spring and fall. But there was little novelty in these mannerisms or formulas, no matter how up-to-date they were considered by the many serious animators anxious to keep au courant. Real novelty lay, that year, in a kind of serene disregard of technique, a bypassing of mannerism, a virginal return to the origins of the art-as in the work of Williams and Dunning. In the 1963 competition, the false Hubleys and false Lenicas ran into the real ones, and Bozetto, after a year of reflection, imitated The Apple. Let it be said at once: the annual interval which a festival like Annecy provides serves above all to show how ridiculous is the idea of a new look based on the successes of the year; on the contrary, it only furnishes a valuable imitation potential. And the wheel turns with a wild speed; styles grow old faster than a twist tune or a swimming suit. Happily, and as always, the essentials remain. -Out of reach, Lardner would say.